Pale Shadow
by SapSorrow
Summary: Five hundred years in the future Thor ,moves from the megacity of Europe to what remains of the Isles of Lower England. Predictably enough the crumbling house on the clifftop he takes over appears to be haunted. What he did not expect was that he would fall in love with the ghost.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

And now the sea feeds. It has been nibbling at this coastline for so long it was only a matter of time before the house and all its memories fell messily down into that hungry mouth. Wave after wave, the tongues of the sea have licked this cliff side hollow, until the house itself is just one more inevitable tasty treat. The sea remembers, because the sea is old; remembers when this house was shining white and green, newly painted and glistening like a wrapped sweet upon the shore. Maybe it can taste that fresh shininess when the house crumbles in its mouth, even beyond the drab grey and peeling paint, the shutters hanging loose and ready to go as a set of wobbly teeth.

There are cautious gulls watching from the stunted trees beyond. Watching the demise of the house, as though in a last farewell to the sea. These waters are a wasteland now and it will not be long before the birds reach out to the megacity and the tides of human rubbish in which new game might be gone.

Everyone is gone. The sea has no yield and the haven briefly offered by the last islands of Kent was only a fleeting one before the waters rose forever, drawing down a new Atlantis that was crumbling long before it made it to the sea bed. The Young Theatre will lie there, fish swimming between the last fixed seats that have stubbornly stayed bolted to the auditorium floor. The curtains stream in the dark tides like mermaids hair before they too fall apart. If there are still voices echoing in song out from this stage it is a song long quenched by the one the sea sings.

There is no beach at Whitstable now. But if you dared take a boat out over the sunken ghost town, you might see rooftops below, reaching out through the water in terrifying peaks, drowned pyramids all.

The sea bed is made of the chalk now. The chalk that once formed the cliffs all the way from here to Dover- and in the wake of so many fishermen now gone such oysters as remain must be laughing in their shells.

The sea laughs with them, chuckling around those last peaks and chimneys. It has got it all now, nothing missed.

But the sea is wrong. The sea got tricked. It hollowed out the houses searching for the tasty shadows within. But the shadows have up and left. The shadows that shone out from the cracks and skirting boards of Chistleworth House have whistled away with the sunlight that came for them, outsmarting everything.

The sea roars for wanting the ghosts that lived inside these sugar shells of houses; wanting to reach them as though they were the chewy centre of this snack. But the sea cannot have them.

They are gone.

They are gone and their voices, the last voices of the living and the dead echo out over these darkening waters – _we are gone, we are done, we are won._ Without the taste of them still here the sea has only that final story to remember.

A story about the sunlight and how it took the shadow home.


	2. Chapter 2

**1.**

Thor half expected the bridge to rattle, but the train was too fast for that. It crossed the channel like a wind that barely gave him time to look down at the sea. Mjoll had told him that was fine, he wouldn't want to look down anyway, but Mjoll, as usual, was wrong. Why would he not want to look at the sea when he was coming to live beside it? Even in the rain – _especially_ – Thor thought – in the rain, the sea was incredible. A wild living thing such as he had never seen in all his life. He had never seen anything beyond the grey of Megacity France, not since he was small and had visited the Lower England Isles with his parents.

He did not want to think about his parents. He was done mourning his father and had felt like more than half of it had been a lie anyway. And his mother. He wanted to believe her when she said she had no problem with his going. He wanted to believe her so hard it was best not to think about it. He looked down at the sea instead, in the little time he had; it was churning and grey and black and oily green and he knew when he got off the train that the rain would be almost impossibly warm.

A disembodied voice cut out of his thoughts telling him that this was Dover, last stop, all to disembark. He wondered why she said _disembark._ A hangover from the days when this station had been a harbour for boats perhaps. He liked the sound of it, archaic and welcoming.

The station was depressing though, even more than he remembered from twenty years ago. The shadowed underpasses and the disused kiosks reeked of an old sadness, desperation and awful hope. Thor remembered his history; five hundred years ago thousands upon thousands had scrambled to enter England from this spot. Back in the days when Kent was still attached to the rest of Britain by land. He could almost hear the desperation, the clamouring and the terrible quiet, people hiding in vans like livestock, hoping beyond hope not to be found. He was too sensitive, his mother had always said so; the idea, the memories that were not his hurt him.

Now, as he _disembarked,_ only a handful came with him. Maybe a dozen. Nobody could afford the trains or to live outside the megacities. Nobody beyond the painfully rich. Few even wanted to.

He had always wanted to. He supposed that made him strange. He stood for a moment, befuddled beneath the underpass, wondering how he had come such an immense distance in such a short space of time. The trains were so fast he had barely had time to think. Luckily before he could try, he heard a voice yelling and eventually realised it was to him –

"Thor! THOR! HEY THOR!" He turned around frowning – "You gonna stand there all day?"

All of a sudden Mjoll was in his space; she had clearly been running and the sudden appearance of her right up in his face was her equivalent of a hug, he could feel the warmth of it radiating from her face. Or it may have been the rain. It ran down her face from the inside of her hood, and trickled down her jacket shiny as down a window.

"What's happening with your bags and shit?"

"Oh –" it occurred to Thor for the first time that his whole lifetime of luggage had to be unloaded. His mother had helped him load it. He wasn't, he realised, very sure of how this worked. Luckily Mjoll was yelling again and, now, with a guy he didn't recognise was getting his cases from the train. She handed him one, took one, left the newcomer to head off ahead with the other two and punched him lightly on the arm –

"Did you just need help with the bags or is there a doctor's note I ought to see? Come _on_ Thor, Heimdall's loading up the car."

Thor trotted after her, to where the only visible car was parked, the man – Heimdall he supposed – loading up the boot.

"Yeah," Mjoll was saying – "It's the only car on the island. Heimdall drives anyone who wants to be driven anywhere – I'll give you his number. He's also the caretaker at Chistleworth, he'll drive you up there, I'm gonna jump out at the village so you can do all that on your own. Don't wanna get in your way."

Thor was aware that he was frowning at her stupidly, his brain trying to catch up with the strange words like _caretaker_ and _village._

"Culture shock," Mjoll was saying now. "Am I right? Either that or you're the only person I know can get like jet lag from a train. _Or_ you're more special than I remember. I know –" she nodded, suddenly taking a dramatic swerve into empathy – "I remember."

She squeezed Thor's hand as they got in the back of the taxi, told him, obscurely, that it ran on vegetable oil and then shut up abruptly to give him peace for the rest of the journey.

Thor supposed it _was_ culture shock. Certainly the green and the stone and the trees that they passed, heading out of Dover, were like nothing the megacity had to offer. Mjoll re-surfaced briefly to point out the ruins of Dover castle to him and then went quiet again. After that they cut across the island, leaving the sea behind for some half hour of country driving. It was amazing to Thor to see, but he realised that ten minutes in he was smiling. There were leaves on some of the trees here, and hedgerows and there was real weather. Even the rain pleased him. It was all so incredible he could not begin to describe it yet. At one point he looked up and Mjoll was looking at him, she smiled to see him smile in a way he knew meant _I know right?!_ He smiled back.

At the first sign of houses the car slowed down and Mjoll got out.

"You want I can come up the house tomorrow and see you?"

"Yeah," Thor figured it was perfect actually – the first night in his very own place on his very own and then company the next day. She had known that too of course. She always knew him without asking or even needing to guess. He supposed that was why they were friends.

As they drove on again, Thor began to feel the strangeness of Heimdall's silence. He opened his mouth several times to break, it but not knowing what to say fell silent again. And then it was only ten minutes driving, out of the village and swinging round onto the clifftop before they reached the house.

"Chistleworth," Heimdall said as he put Thor's cases down on the gravel. He looked at Thor curiously and nodded in a way that made Thor very much want to know what he was thinking.

"Thank –y-" Thor began, but the car was already gone.

Just for a moment, Thor put his head back and let the rain fall onto his face. You couldn't do that back home without getting scars from the water. He even went as far as daring to put out his tongue and taste it. To his amazement it tasted like water. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He looked towards the sea, maybe some thirty metres down from the house, sloping brown green cliff top and scrubby trees. Then he looked back at the house.

It was not _pretty._ But Thor had not been hoping for pretty. He had been hoping, he realised without having known it, for exactly this. This ramshackle, solitary house that had quite clearly _once been_ pretty. The trees that grew alongside the gravel path, as he headed up to the green door, were stunted but somehow alive. Thor supposed it was the rain. The heat never got less, even here, but the rain was real and vital and, he supposed, could actually make things grow.

Thor clutched the large, carved key that had been in his pocket the whole time. He had already studied it for hours. It was unlike any key he had ever seen; metal, not a plastic disc, with crenulations like teeth at the top and a metal ring at the base. He tentatively touched his own front door. A little dry leafy paint came away on his fingers. To the right was a stone plaque crusted with chalk and salt that read CH-ST-R-H H—SE. He started to make notes in his head of all the things that he would have, he supposed, a life time to get fixed and make bright again. His heart rose to the challenge.

When he put the old key in the lock, he expected to have a challenge already in getting it to turn. But almost as soon as he moved it there was a click and the door swung open as though someone were pulling it from inside.

In truth it felt to Thor as though someone really had exerted pressure from within to open the door and it swung not with a creak but with a sigh that sounded almost human. It was a sigh of immense relief, and as Thor stepped into the house for the first time he could feel the whole place tremble with that sigh. He could almost catch in it a whispered word. The whole place seemed to glow with it, seemed alive.

So completely did Thor feel that he was not alone that, foolish though he felt as he turned on the hall light, he called out softly –

"Hello? Is there someone there?"

He was holding his breath in wait and the house held its breath with him.

Because there was. They both knew that there was.

_x_


	3. Chapter 3

**2.**

But of course no answer came. Still, as Thor took his first steps into the dark of the house, it seemed that everywhere he trod footfalls ran away from him like an echo, only the echo had been there first.

The main hall curved off to rooms, one left and one right; Thor went first to one and then the other, turning lights on as he went. He did not mean to be so free with the electricity in future but just for now, seeing it all for the first time, he figured it was worth it. He had never owned a place this big; even luxury in the city came packed into a small space and he had never before seen a place that was just his. Though the more he got a feel of these rooms, the more he wondered if that really was the case.

The place came with its own furniture. Thor, from the point at which he had stopped to stand in the living room, could only guess at how old some of this was. It was almost more exciting than the place, pulling off the dustsheets that looked as though they had lain there for years. Most of the items were _wood._ Thor had to scratch it gently to check that this was true and from the little he knew of trees it did seem to be. He would have to ask someone about that. They hadn't made furniture from real wood for over a hundred years.

After the first tentative explorations Thor began pulling away the dust sheets with almost childish excitement; it was like opening presents. He supposed a whole new life was a pretty big present. He found himself overwhelmed, very simply, by how _brown_ everything was; wood everywhere in startling contrast to his old apartment's Perspex and chrome. There was even a real piano in the corner left of the window, crouched in readiness like an exotic beast. He could not think of anyone even mentioning having seen a piano in their lifetime. It gathered shadows beneath its pedals like nervous but deadly young. Later, he decided; maybe he could even get online – electricity permitting – see if he could find a basic how – to –play video.

He sat down quite suddenly, sinking into an armchair, dizzy at the understanding of all that he now owned. He had known, in theory, that the house came furnished but the reality of seeing it all was something else altogether. Then the act of sitting down was so bouncy, so soft that he stood up again, surprised. He almost laughed out loud and, poking the seat cushion, sat down again more gently. An _armchair_ of all things! He was glad he had done some reading and knew some of these names of objects.

To think, he pondered, looking around, taking it all in – or trying to – he had come here to get away from the close binding capitalism of megacity life and would up in possession of so much _stuff._ But then again, it was such stuff as city people rarely dreamed. Strange, that one had to be so rich to afford the simplicity of the countryside. He wondered what it was that had drawn him to this archaic way of living his whole life, but drawn he had been, most certainly.

This house, even with his never having known of such a place, felt right to him like the city had never done; almost as though it were the very place that had always called to him. It felt as though he had come home and he found himself smiling out loud at the feeling as he had not smiled in longer than he could remember.

With the smile came a deep breath as he sank back into the chair, ready to get used to the feeling. It was only when he felt a gentle caress to the side of his face that he realised it was not a deep breath that _he_ had made.

Thor did not jump at the shock of realisation, but his forehead knitted even as he turned his head with curious instinct into the fingers that so clearly ran down the edge of his ear where it met his jawline. He turned his face into it like a long lost lover. Slowly, as though only half aware that he was missing something, his eyes followed the turn of his head to see who or what had appeared behind him.

There was nothing there.

Thor blinked hard, unaware really why he was so surprised. He stood up and raised his hand to his face, dismayed at himself for acting like a young girl in a story. But then, hadn't he read all those long ago stories and wanted to be a part of them? Was not this, why he was here? His head was telling him to be afraid, but nothing in his chest seemed to want to hear it.

He had come to the island, to the house on the cliff top to be alone. Not only that, but largely that. Within the space of a heartbeat he had learned not only that he was certainly not alone here, but that he somehow did not mind.

The house. He should look around the rest of the house. He knew it, more as though someone had nudged him or whispered in his ear than because he had come up with the idea himself.

The room to the right was a formal dining room. It took only a very short exploration for Thor to decide that he would probably not be spending much time in there. Certainly not alone. In the front hall the base of the stairs was so wide it covered all but a narrow corridor to the right. Following this corridor now he came to the kitchen. He almost gasped aloud. Back home, kitchens were a few cubic feet, functional boxes and little more. This was – this was – he almost wanted to cry. He loved cooking, however silly everyone had always thought he was for wanting to do such things himself, and the thought of being able to play for hours in a space like this was almost more incredible than pianos and armchairs put together. A huge long window above the sink and back counters looked out onto the garden and allotment. Looking out was almost as exciting as the kitchen. There was a red door off to the right, bright with peeling paint that he almost wanted to head straight out of. He could look over the grounds, the space in which food really grew in the soil – he had arranged for a stack of books to be sent to the house ahead of him to teach him how, and Mjoll had promised to help him too. Plus he could rely on her to fix the falling down sheds out there and help him figure out how the solar panels worked. He had a moment of giddy schoolboy excitement at all the things he had to do, a curious urge to high five the air beside him and the strange feeling that it might high five him back.

He felt, standing in that cheery kitchen, as though his joy, his enthusiasm were awakening something in the house and, even though, he had once thought he wanted his new life to be a solitary one, he could not have felt warmer or more golden at the feeling of this company. He decided to leave the garden for today; it was starting to grow dark outside and he realised, with a sudden rush, how tired he was. Thankfully there was a little edible food in a cupboard and he did not have to start working out how the oven worked. It took him more than twenty minutes just to make tea with a kettle. He wondered, as he sat at the solid wood table in the kitchen, who had left these bits for him and made a mental note to find out and thank them.

As if he could even experience more today as well, the food tasted amazing. There was bread and butter and cheese, all broken down into their component slabs rather than an instant sandwich. It occurred to Thor that in fact they might come like this first, given the natural order of things. He cut bits off with a kitchen knife, hoping he was doing it right. The bread tore in chunks and had multiple textures and the cheese was salty and strange and almost unbearably good. A curious need to share the experience led him to leave the last small bit on a plate on the table when he got up to go upstairs. Like an offering, he supposed, to whatever gods or beings were sharing this experience with him. He bewildered himself by doing it but it felt right nonetheless.

Following the curve upstairs of the great sweeping staircase Thor began to feel as though he were walking in a dream. So much so that he had to go back downstairs, half way up to get the two suitcases he would need upstairs and then again to turn off all the lights and find a switch downstairs for the one on the landing.

Upstairs consisted of one long corridor running right and a bathroom to the left. There was an actual _library_ in one room. He wished he had the energy to look closer or at the study opposite but picking a bedroom seemed far more important just for now. He eventually settled for the one to the left by the gothic window at the end of the corridor and dumped his cases on the floor in relief.

He thought that he would sleep as soon as he got into bed. But then he thought. First he thought about the house, each little part of it, then of all the parts he had not seen. Then he thought about the journey, running it in reverse all the way back to his flat on the Asgard side of the city. He thought about his mother, who he supposed he should have called, and of his father's funeral; seeing Mjoll again for the first time in eight years and realising it would never matter how long they went for; they would always pick up at the same place each time. How the little she said about life on the island made him certain he had to be here.

Then, again, he thought about the house, walked all over it again in his mind and it seemed to him that everywhere he walked another walked beside him. He could almost reach out and touch their hand. He wondered if the house was haunted or if there was any such thing. He wondered if he should shut the bedroom door and felt a certain mad delight in knowing there was no need, not here with just him. He wondered how long he had lain in bed wondering and eventually turned out the light.

The darkness that came was strange and silvery and when the shadows came out to play in it Thor sat back up in bed, more awake than he had been in ages.

Whoever it was had decided to refer to shadows as things that could _play_ at all – they hadn't been kidding, and what Thor observed that first night at Chistleworth convinced him, not only that a shadow could jape and make fun but that they were sly things composed out of mischief and bursting with tricks.

_x_

 **I wanted to get further than this! I wanted Thor to see the shadows and have his first haunted dreams in this chapter, I really did – but he took so long exploring the house that that's all you get – Loki will have to wait until chapter 3 now! Also I guess now is the time to admit that this is gonna be very hella slow burn – if that wasn't already apparent, so if you're not prepared to wait a lot of chapters for developments you might wanna back out now, having said that I DO know exactly what we are moving towards and will get there in my own sweet time and also there WILL be more Loki such as he is in the next chapter! Thank you and pleasant dreams of Loki ghosts! :-)**


	4. Chapter 4

**3.**

Living in the city, Thor realised, you forgot how dark the night could be. Even without a moon to be seen, the city night came in amber and red and green from the lights and the buildings outside and then the sky itself purple and red and silver, throwing a dark rainbow of shade through every attempt to block out the world. But here. Here he could see the moon and see it silver and white in the sky, through the crack in the curtains that he left there just to regard this strangeness the better. But then again the moonlight coming in through the windows was the _only_ light, and it threw the shadows into more frightening relief than if it had been pitch dark in the room.

Lying at first on his side, towards the window, he could see the long shadows crawling and lurching towards the bed from all corners of the room. The wardrobe on the other side of the window from the bed cast a fat black pall that crept up the bedsheet and stole squarely beneath the window. Thor turned away from it, uneasy, wondering if having his back to the window instead would help. It did not. Not only was there the creeping awareness that something could perhaps come through the window to stand behind him, but the shadow of the bedroom door now cut out towards the bed like a great sharp wing. His hand, which he had foolishly let drop over the side of the bed, fell right into this shadow and he whipped it back quickly, cold with the sudden horrible idea that he might lose that hand to the cutting shadow.

And then, as his eyes helplessly roamed, he could see the patterns on the floor from the grilled window in the corridor; a criss-crossed net of black diamonds marked out by the old panes. As he watched the floor in a growing sort of primeval fear, it seemed to Thor that he saw a silvery patch of light extricate itself from the diamonds and creep, out across the floor and into the bedroom, sliding across the shiny boards like a swimmer. As Thor watched, mesmerised, the white milky light seemed to catch in his eyes and the pale shadow stretched and lengthened, slithering forward until it lapped around the foot of the bed. For all their lurching and creeping the other shadows had been undeniably still, and those phrases grew redundant in the face of what now crept in all animate honesty up onto the coverlet near his foot. As it crawled towards him a kind of understanding latched on to Thor that made him bolt for the light switch.

 _There was nothing in this room or beyond that could possibly be throwing this shadow._

Thor's spine prickled cold from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, chilled by a wind that could not possibly be making it through the bolted windows. He could not take his eyes off that streak of lucid silver that was not almost lying across his leg. Too intimate; too terribly intimate. Thor whacked the light switch, drew his legs to his chest and snapped himself into a sitting position, panting in the bright light.

The brightness dashed all the shadows away and they fled with an almost audible sigh of disappointment. Just about hearing that sigh, Thor felt a curious sadness even in the midst of his relief.

Nevertheless he turned the corridor light on before turning his own off and endeavouring to sleep again.

Somehow – it was not so mysterious, he was very tired – Thor did sleep, and before he woke again he dreamed. The dreams came at him fractured and in pieces, like highlights from a story. It was not his own story, he could tell, but in the dream it felt as if they were or at least that this story he was just receiving pieces of was linked now to his own.

In the first he stood within a dark cold cave. He touched all the walls, turning, looking for a way out. But there was no way out and the walls were smooth and shiny. They pulsed beneath his hands and moved. In the seconds before the dream moved on he knew that this was no cave and that the feeling beneath his hands was one of snakeskin.

In the second dream he was running along the clifftop. All of a sudden he rounded a corner and stopped dead on the edge of a field of waving grass. Across this raised expanse stood a stunted tree, grey against a grey sky. Beneath the tree a group of men huddled, four, maybe six, arguing in muted voices. He could not help but think of conspiracy. They too were grey against a grey sky. He froze at the edge of the dream, terrified that the men would turn and see him.

In the final dream he was coiling around himself in cold water growing dark, reaching up to where the light was, so far away. He was scrabbling at the ice, beating on the roof of the sea and could you die in a dream? He had no sooner wondered this than he woke up.

He took a deep breath waking up, feeling very much to need it. A watery sunlight was sifting through into the room, a closer reflection of that light he had been so desperate to reach in the final snippet of dream. He ran a hand through his hair and held his head for a long time. When he finally opened the curtain and saw chinks of his garden winking up at him he felt almost instantly better. It moved him to get up and get dressed, open the bedroom door and step out into a corridor that seemed startlingly light. Of course, he remembered, he had left the light on all night. He shook his head at himself as he turned it off; now he would have barely any electricity all day. He would not be able to do that again.

In the bright optimism of morning he wondered what had ever made him feel so spooked. Light and shadow that was all. He had never even seen the moon before last night – not since he was a child – how was he supposed to know how moonlight might behave?

Moonlight falling onto his bed, that was all; really it should have felt romantic.

He made tea in the kitchen, not even surprised to note that the food he had left out was gone. He was more touched, even a little pleased with himself – and making the brew was quicker than yesterday. He slouched off to drink it in that wonderful armchair in the front room. He put the tea down as he reclined and let the softness soothe him. In fact, after a short night's sleep of faintly troubling dreams it lulled him all the way back to sleep.

Someone was kissing him. The press of soft lips on his forehead, in the corners of his eyes and mouth, the top of his neck. A voice whispered –

"Shhh, shhh, I'm sorry – I'm sorry –"

"Sorry?" he tried to say – "Sorry for what?"

But maybe he really had seen it for the voice replied;

"I wanted to show you – but it was too soon, too unkind – too soon but I've waited so long –"

Dream Thor felt as though his heart could break at the yearning he heard in those last two words.

"Who are you?" he asked. That voice against his skin was like a kiss, a warm breath, the speaker's fingers running through his hair as if in awe.

"So close –" they murmured – "I never touched before – I tried – I know – this isn't really it but it feels _so close._ I waited _so long."_

"So long for what?"

"Your hair is so _bright –_ " the speaker laughed suddenly, as though it had not heard Thor's question or focus its own thoughts. It whispered teasing, spilling words like kisses –

"So golden. You hold sunbeams in your hair. So many. How could I –" it sighed then. Thor felt, suddenly, as though the speaker were losing connection and the idea made him nearly panic. He felt himself reaching out.

"Wait!" he was begging – "Don't go!"

"How could I ever –" the voice went sad, it was breaking Thor's heart and came from far away now, too far for him to reach – " – ever be anything but a shadow?"

When Thor awoke his eyes were sharp and wet and his hands were still reaching out just a little. And he was alone.

The tea was almost cold. He drank it anyway. It was still good. He got up, went upstairs and had a shower. It was cold. He added it to the list of things he needed to sort out.

Less dampened than he supposed he should have felt Thor knew what he wanted to do next. The garden waited for him as much as the house and he suspected he was in for a lush wilderness of exploration akin only to stories of adventure he had found in books.

The bright red back door that led off to the garden was calling him and he bounded back down the stairs to greet the call with enthusiasm. But someone had been there already this morning. The larger part of the upper part of the door consisted of an old glass panel, beaded with the fresh condensation of the early morning. Condensation in which someone, with a trembling finger had clearly trailed out the words –

THE YOUNG -

On looking closely Thor could see the markings of a third word that had not quite made it through. As though the writer had struggled to get what was there and the finger had fallen exhausted on the final word.

Thor tried to shake off the chill and stepped out into the misty garden.

_x_

 **Heee, well I hope all this was fairly creepy and will upset someone in bed tonight! Of course, it's only Loki, how scared could one be? Eh heh. Heheheh. :-)**


	5. Chapter 5

**4.**

Thor puzzled over the words all that morning as he explored the garden, wondering what they could mean, wondering why, though it prickled the back of his neck, he was not more terrified. But he knew, with a certainty as inexplicable as anything else, that whatever ghost haunted this house, it did not mean him harm. He suspected only that it was trying to tell him something and itched with the need to help.

The garden however, provided enough distraction to keep him from distress. From the yard outside the kitchen windows he could see that from the back the roof of the house was dark and shiny with solar panels. He had read in the brief about those and been pleased. Not that he disliked wind farms – the great whale tail structures had reached out to him out of the sea on the way over here, and he was looking forward to the view of them later when he walked the cliff top, but for powering his own house the solar panels would be quieter and less distracting. He supposed the wind farms powered the town and public areas, each house having its own energy supply the same way they did things in the city. He was not sure yet how hard he needed to conserve power and supposed he would have to just use what he could and see, even if that meant going in darkness for the first few evenings. One of the first things he had done in the kitchen was find the supply of candles and the _camping stove –_ if that was the right word for it.

Where the patio ended and the allotments began the garden became much more unruly, although not, as Thor had expected, as much as he had thought it would be in the knowledge that this house had not had a tenant in over seventy years. Again he wondered if that was Heimdall's doing, the curious gentlemen he was more and more coming to realise it would be best if he better acquaint himself. He walked out between the vegetable _patches_ a little way and knelt down. There were green plants growing in tangles out of the soil – he had seen plants before a few times but _soil._ He touched it with his fingertips at first; it was slightly damp, warm, rich brown like the wood and flecked with chalk. It was a curious feeling, like a soft material but crumbly like breadcrumbs. He sifted some though his fingers and then, smiling to see it fall, plunged his hands right into the ground. It was almost surreal the way it yielded, at least until he closed his hands around something smooth, cold and hard – like a rock only softer. He dug it out of the earth, stared at the knobbly round shape in his hands for a long time. He was not sure, but he thought it might be a potato. He frowned, interested. Had he just dug _food_ up out of the ground?

Thor stood up and went over to the little shed to the right of the patio. Someone had curiously hung the key up just under the sloping triangular roof. He took it down and opened up. Inside the shed smelled like nothing he had ever smelled. It was intense and good, like the earth outside and like wood if wood were distilled into a perfume. There were other smells too, he could not recognise all of them, paint perhaps and turpentine maybe. There were tools, none of which he recognised – one of them looked like a spade from a pack of cards. Was it a tool as well? He could not wait for Mjoll to get here and tell him all these things.

He did at least find a large metal kind of bucket on wheels with a handle, which he took to maneuverer the contraption to where he had been kneeling by the first patch of earth. He placed the possible potato in it carefully and fell back to rooting through the earth to see if there were more. There were. It was brilliant; like the treasure hunts his mother had thrown him as a child only messier. The mess was even better though, and it was not long before his hands were covered in brown gloves of soil, nestling in the lines of his palms and settling down beneath his nails. It was exhausting and fantastic work and he was soon gathering quite a pile of the vegetables in this useful contraption.

Thor was still up beyond the wrists in the soil when he heard the door open and Mjoll announce that she had brought pies.

"How did you know?" he stood up, wiping his forehead down with a hand. It occurred to him this must have instantly painted his forehead with soil and did not much care.

"Know what?" Mjoll came out onto the patio with a plastic bag in her hand.

"I wouldn't have eaten breakfast."

"And come straight out into the garden?" Mjoll raised an eyebrow – "Fucking hell Thor, have you _seen_ the state of yourself?"

Thor ignored her and went into the kitchen to wash his hands off. When he went back onto the patio Mjoll was prodding the shaky looking garden table and chairs

"I can fix these," she said, sitting down on the wall instead and taking the contents out of the bag, lying them on the stone beside her. They were wrapped in towels and Thor looked at them with interest.

"Tea?"

"You worked the kettle then? Yeah go on. What kind do you have?"

"There are different _kinds?"_

"Yeah," Mjoll laughed – "You should have seen my house when I first moved in, some old guy had left me half his tea collection, pots of leaves all over the pantry."

"It comes in _leaves?"_ Thor boggled – "I want some."

He came back outside with two cups. Mjoll unwrapped the packages to reveal pork pies that were like nothing Thor had ever seen, lumpy and crusty and large, none of them the same shape. When he bit one he wondered for a moment, having not wondered through all the events of last night – if he was in a dream. His mouth filled with flavour and the pastry crumbled. The pork was tender and made him nearly drool.

"So –" he said, around a mouth of pie – "What do you think about ghosts?"

Mjoll looked at him very slowly and closed her eyes very patiently.

"Oh." She announced calmly – "Fucking hell. Shit Thor it's been _one night._ You can't have gone weird already."

"That's a no then?"

Mjoll groaned.

"I dunno. No. Maybe." She thought quietly for a moment and then nodded – "Yeah, okay."

This time it was Thor's turn to groan and shake his head. 

"I thought you were the one person would give me a straight answer."

"Oh I'm nothing if not straight –"

"Well that is a lie. _"_

"Shut up Thor. Yeah okay, you have a ghost. If there was gonna be a house for it I guess this'd be it. Is it a _friendly_ ghost?"

There was a just a hint of laughter in her voice that made Thor suspicious –

"You're referencing some ancient movie I have not seen aren't you?"

"Aye, usually."

"Yeah, I mean –" Thor told her everything that had happened since he got into the house. She listened, thoughtfully, Thor thought at first but at the end he suspected she had switched right off because she was looking at the pie crust in her hand like it was crystal ball.

"Mjoll? You listening to me?" She shrugged –

"Actually I was thinking about Euphemia Coulson, the stone mason's daughter".

"Mjoll!" Thor yelled, groaned and then, frowning – "What's a stonemason?"

"Walls and graves," she shrugged "Anyway yeah – _the young –_ I'm mulling it over. Meanwhile what are you doing with that wheelbarrow?"

"The what?"

"The wheelbarrow Thor – the – the – big metal bucket on wheels."

"Oh," Thor said – "Is that what that is? I was using it for these –" he went over to it and picked up a potato.

"That's a potato," Mjoll told him gently. Thor almost did a dance of pleasure at his guess being right for once. Mjoll came beside him to prod at the ground with a foot –

"Someone's been keeping this alright for you."

"I thought so! Someone left the kitchen well stocked too."

"Probably Heimdall."

"I'll thank him when I get a chance."

Mjoll grunted –

"That your greenhouse?"

Thor had not known what it was. Mjoll headed off down the garden path to look. In the early morning sun it looked like something completely alien, all poles and panes of glass, sticking out here and there like a tiny city-scape all of its own. He had assumed it was broken and said as much.

"Yeah," Mjoll nodded, moving some poles around – "It _is_ broken. Easy enough though."

"I forgot you were a builder."

"Yeah. That thing where some of us have _jobs_ to do, eesh Odinson, twenty years of friendship and this is all I get."

"It's been awhile – Mewmew."

"Thor," Mjoll was _looking_ at him very pointedly. It was frightening – "Don't call me that."

"Well don't call me _Odinson."_

"Yes but – Thor, you remember what happened when you last called me that don't you?" She said it so sweetly Thor found himself starting to shrink;

"You – uh, punched me in the dick."

"And that is the closest to it I will _ever_ get," Mjoll smiled – "Come on – let's re-build some shit."

For the next few hours they worked solidly repairing the greenhouse, between Mjoll's knowledge and Thor's strength and – as she just had to point out later – Mjoll's strength – the work came on in leaps and bounds and by mid-afternoon the last shelves were re-fitted and it was ready to go. Mjoll handed him the last boards for the top shelves wiping her forehead –

"Here. You're taller than me, you get this."

"And I have better hair," Thor agreed.

"I think that's a tad irrelevant don't you?"

Mjoll had, as Thor recklessly put it, about as much hair as a scrubbing brush, due to a habit of getting fed up and shaving her head almost every summer. They glared at each other amiably and high fived the completion of the work on the green house.

"You want, I can come by tomorrow and help you plant some shit," Mjoll said as they walked back up the garden path.

"How do you …. _plant?"_ Thor was fascinated.

"There are these things called seeds and – fucking hell Thor, I'll show you tomorrow okay? Easier than trying to explain."

"Okay."

"Oh yeah, and I dunno but I've been thinking about it, and I dunno but maybe the theatre?"

"Huh, what?"

"In town. The Young Theatre. It's just down the road. Maybe that's what your mystery words were pointing you to," she shrugged – "It's all I could think of. Worth a look. Y'know, in a few days when you come and see me. Go take a look around, it's like over five hundred years old or some shit, but they still play some stuff now and then. It's not a wreck. Not yet."

Mjoll shrugged again and raised a hand in a goodbye as she left, though she said it no more than she had offered a hello, earlier. Thor was left standing by the back door suddenly cold. More than that, he felt like he had been hollowed out and filled up and down with icy water. Somehow the mention of the theatre had frightened him with a chill that nothing in the house had given him and though he knew that he would, he did not want to go there. Not at all. At the same time he knew, without a doubt, that uncertain as she had been, Mjoll had come straight to the truth. It was a particular talent she had really. All of a sudden Thor found himself wishing he had not asked and she had not known.

_x_

 **Yup, still no Loki….but we're getting closer to him all the time! Tisn't my fault if Thor keeps spending many chapters getting distracted by potatoes! Who doesn't like potatoes? You're gonna enjoy it when he gets to the theatre next chapter though, I promise! I know it seems like I gave that away faaar too soon but trust me there are so many mysteries I haven't even kick started yet – the original version of this story I had in mind started in the theatre for the first chapter, so there's a LOT to unravel! :-)**


	6. Chapter 6

**5.**

That night found Thor on his knees on the kitchen floor staring at the oven in an intensity of confusion. He knew, logically, that it would make no difference if he looked away for a few minutes, but he was not sure he could bring himself to take the risk. He only moved to go check the energy inverter meter every few minutes to see exactly how much this was eating up. It was a lot, compared to everything else. He had gone around the house that evening checking out all the energy appliances and how much they cost to run, comparing it to the levels on the inverter screen. In the city there had always been people or systems to do this for him, and each individual building had not been so entirely dependent on just its own energy source, but out here it was different. If he ran out, he ran out until the solar panels caught him some more, as though the sunlight were butterflies in a net. By the time he had poked the potato and deemed it to be of an edible softness he realised he would only be able to spend maybe four minutes talking to his mother later that night.

As he sat down to dinner, however, he decided that it was completely worth it. He had found a little leftover cheese in the cool box and a couple of tomatoes from the garden that Mjoll had pointed out to him, and these all combined with his very first home baked potato to make what had to be the best meal he had ever eaten. The outside was as crispy as the inside was fluffy and he almost could not wait to watch the butter melt before eating it. The tomatoes tasted so different from what he knew of tomatoes that they might have been a different food stuff. These were almost warm with deliciousness, tangy with outdoor flavour. He could have eaten the whole meal twice.

Afterwards he got on the laptop and called his mother in the city. It was strange to see her again, so far away and from a place like this. If she was missing him more than it was acceptable to say she did not let it show. She rarely let slip any negative emotion she may have felt and it worried him. He wished almost that she would just so that he could know rather than worrying out the possibilities.

The computer cut out just as they were saying goodbye and, with the house gone dark, he knew there would be no more energy until morning. He lit a candle to take to bed with a combined feeling of fear and excitement. If the shadows came tonight, if they did that strange dance, there would not even be a light to turn on.

But the shadows did not come, did not play with him, tease him or torment him, and his dreams too, were strangely innocuous after last night. He had no sensation as he had done since he moved in of their being anything else in the house with him. He knew it would have been sensible to feel relieved but somehow he did not. He woke up the next morning missing the shadows and their games and half wishing they would come back.

Thor scowled at the inverter that morning, noticing that it was showing no sign of the available energy having gone up since yesterday. He knew he had slept at least two hours after the sun came up and was not sure if that was right. He tried a light switch; that still wasn't working either. But then, he had not been here long enough to calculate it all effectively yet and he was aware that he first night's decision to leave the light on would cripple him a little. He decided not to worry about it too much; he had plans out of the house for the day and there would doubtless be something to work with when he got back.

That morning he walked into Whitstable. From the clifftop path he came to the beach first. It was nothing like the beaches he had seen at Calais port on the way out here; long dark sandy stretches. Instead he found strips of pebbled slopes, with low wooden structures running between them stretching all the way out in front of the buildings and around to the next curve in the cliffs. The sea was far out when he came down and to look out for the tideline drew his eye across a vaster panorama than he had ever seen. He had heard the word _horizon_ before and never been able to picture it – he supposed this was what it meant – being able to see where the sky met the water, the gentle tones of grey diving into one another, gently shimmering in the distance. He looked out to sea for a long time.

Walking up the promenade towards where the houses really started, Thor felt as though everything jagged and blocked up in his life was coming loose and smoothing over. He listened idly to the gulls call and the waves pull at the stones, the gentle breathing of the beach all around him and felt as though it could hypnotise him so gently and casually he would not know it had happened.

So many smells too he breathed out in joyous freedom of knowing that he lived here now and could perhaps one day become used to such things. Salt and stone and dried seaweed and, as he turned up a road onto the high street, something unbelievable, like hot potatoes and grease and fish that made him stop and close his eyes, wondering if he could eat the very smell. He had read about fish and chips in books but nothing could have prepared him for the taste; fat chips and fresh fish, lightly battered, that the man took great pride in telling him came from the harbour not thirty metres away where fishermen still plied a trade that had been going since Roman times. History regardless, the fish was mouth wateringly delicious.

By the time he finally made it to Mjoll's it was early afternoon. She rolled her eyes at him and all too neatly outlined all the things he had done that she had known would keep him from visiting until the afternoon when he had said he would be round in the morning. Nevertheless, when he decided to head off, she told him that the theatre proprietor was expecting him and that she had popped round yesterday to let him know that Thor would be coming. Thor was surprised and grateful enough only to glare at her a little for immediately assuming that that was where he was headed next. Anyway, it _had_ been his plans, so he could not complain too much.

The theatre stood a little further up the high street, a curved road heading inland on the edge of the town, the last building in the street; a peeling, whitewashed square of a building that was probably the height of modernity in the late twentieth century. The more recent addition of its solar panels ran like a dark shadow all the way down the front part of the roof, looking out towards the sea in the hope of glimpsing the best of the sunlight. A couple of cracked glass cases by the main door housed fading posters for shows a good while out of date. Inside Thor found a man in the ticket booth who grunted an acknowledgement, told him he didn't usually even come over here on a week day, and told Thor to "Knock yourself out" when Thor asked if he could have a look round the place.

A dingy flight of steps off to the right led Thor through a door and into a small waiting area, flanked by a darkened bar along the right. The main lights had been put on, he supposed for his benefit, but the ones above the drinks cabinets were all out and the room fluttered with shadows and the echoes of his feet. He could hear his own breathing very loudly in the quiet building and breathed out loudly in the hope that it would make him breathe more quietly thereafter.

He turned off to the left, pushing open one of the two large swing doors that led into the auditorium. He heard a creak as though the other set of doors had opened too, though they had not, and felt, once again like he was not alone. As though one of the hovering shadows had disengaged itself from around the bar and come to join him. Without being able to see anything this time Thor felt the same sensation of being approached as he had felt when the pale shadow crawled onto his bed, only this time with no accompanying sense of fear.

"Hello," he said quietly, into the empty tiers, feeling a little crazy but pleased to do so all the same – "Little shadow," he added, not knowing what else to call his curious, invisible companion. He let go of the door he had opened to come in here and a playful wind tickled around his ears as if in reply. He was almost tempted to smile, chuckle beneath the caress or blow kisses back to the wind. He did none of them physically, but felt as though the shadows knew he was thinking it.

Thor walked down the aisles between the seats, towards the stage, the balcony looming over him like a thundercloud. In its light his shadow beside him looked strange; slighter, smaller and – he noticed as he stopped walking – out of step with him.

It was not his shadow.

"Hey –" he began, looking down. He moved a couple of steps. The shadow moved with him. He walked a few; it did not quite keep up. All of a sudden he heard, quite clearly a warm but echoing giggle from behind the stage curtain and heard footsteps running ahead of him down the aisle. When he looked to the side this time his shadow was his own again.

Now that he was approaching the stage, Thor found that he did not want to look behind the red velvet curtain. He also knew that he was going to. The shadow was deeper down here and towards the front of the stage centre he could see a small orchestra pit, only half gated, that looked as though it would like him to fall into it. He skirted to the left of it and up the wooden steps to the stage. When he put his hand on the curtain winch the place fell terribly silent. So silent he could hear the breathing coming from the other side of the curtain. It was frightened breathing now, deep and slightly panicky as though – Thor did not know where the idea came from but it came very strongly – as though the other had realised for the first time the reality of where they were and did not like it at all.

As Thor rolled up the curtain from the winch the breathing turned into a soft and then a terrified sobbing, not, he felt, in the hope that Thor would stop but in the knowledge that they both would soon be facing the naked stage. When the curtain was up and Thor stepped out onto the stage the first thing he heard was footsteps running off into the wings.

He looked out over the darkened auditorium at the red seats turned black in the shadow, up at the two boxes, one either side of the stage, looking down on him like big bellied beasts. He felt a dread standing here that actually alleviated a little when he heard the sound of singing coming from the wings.

It was a soft singing, filled with echoes and far away as though through a television set that had been all but muted. Thor followed it, cautiously off the stage and into the wings. A long white corridor curved around the back of the stage and off towards the changing rooms. Down here the voice was clearer and Thor was almost agonizingly struck by its beauty. It was a clear androgynous voice, hauntingly sweet, sad and hopeful all at once. It was the voice of someone who knew how to fill this entire theatre and keep the audience always coming back. It was a voice he wanted to take in his arms and keep close and safe. But he could do that no more than he could a shadow. He knew, without hearing the words that the singer had performed here and that something unspeakable had happened here. He did not want to know what and he had to find out.

 _I want to help._ He wanted to say it out loud to the shadows – to _the_ shadow, the one he was coming more and more to think of as _his._ But as soon as he thought it the voice went quiet, trailing out on a high note that sounded like one of pleasure and thanks. _Whatever has happened here, I want to make it right._

He thought he heard a sigh, like the whisper of a curtain, felt against his cheek one of those curious ghostly kisses he was almost coming to crave and then he was alone again.

When Thor came out of the theatre, blinking into the light of outside, there was a car parked there in front of the main door. _The_ car, Thor remembered. The window was rolled down and Heimdall was leaning just inside. The man beckoned him over as calmly as though Thor had ordered the car to come round for him. Certainly, Thor could not but doubt that Heimdall had been waiting there exclusively for him.

"Get in Odinson," Heimdall nodded, and Thor did.

_x_

 **Oooh where they going? :-) Anyways in the next chapter Heimdall gonna finally tell Thor some things. Things about what a certain little ghost got up to when it was alive.**

 **:-)**


	7. Chapter 7

**6.**

Heimdall drove them in silence until they came to the turn off road for Chistleworth House. When he continued straight on rather than down to the house Thor turned to ask Heimdall where they were going. Heimdall did not answer straight away but pulled up the car, apparently in the middle of nowhere a half mile or so up from the house. He parked by the side of a dirt track, only just recognizable as a walking path running along the cliff edge, told Thor that it was a part of an almost ancient clifftop walk leading all the way to Broadstairs and let Thor out of the car.

"What are we doing here?" Thor asked. Heimdall acted as though he had not heard him and asked instead how he was settling into the house. Thor thanked him for having stocked up the kitchen in preparation for his coming and for keeping the garden in the functioning state he had received it in. Heimdall inclined his head in receipt of this thanks and suddenly seemed to grow bored of the conversation he had started.

"Tell me –" Heimdall cut in – "How long have you been able to contact the dead?"

"Contact the dead?" Thor frowned – "I don't know what you mean – I've never –"

"You've seen things, have you not?" Heimdall continued unfazed – "In the house. Dreamed of things perhaps. Received messages you can't explain?"

Thor could see in Heimdall's face that there was no point denying it.

"How did you know?"

"Because I have not."

It was, Thor realised, the opposite of the answer he had been expecting. Heimdall made a face; it was possibly the first expression Thor had seem him make at all – slightly apologetic as though he realised he was not making sense.

"I'll explain," he said.

"Yes, please do".

"I've been coming out to Chistleworth for a long time," Heimdall said – "It was not long before I realised there was something in that house. Something that was trying to make contact with me. But it never did. I noticed this because that's not the way it usually is. I asked you if you were someone who could contact the dead because I have been able to all my life and yet – did you never wonder why the house has not been lived in these seventy years?"

"I confess it seemed strange".

Heimdall nodded.

"Chistleworth house has not had a full time resident since the early twenty first century. Since that resident died, over five hundred years ago, no other person or persons who have moved into the house have felt able to stay for more than a year. All of them said they first experienced strange shadows, things making noises where they should not, doors opening and closing – all of them said it was as though something was trying to communicate with them. All of them failed to hear the message and then felt they were being pushed out of the house by the thing's anger and…. frustration. Yes, I think it was frustration that whoever it was could not get through. But it's different with you. When I heard that you had made the connection between your house and the theatre I knew that the suspicions I have always had as to the identity of your ghost were true."

"The person who died here in the early twenty first century," Thor guessed. Heimdall nodded.

"I've lived here a long time Mr Odinson; had time to learn the history of the place. And I dug up an interesting story from those days. You'll want to hear it."

Thor did not need to reply for Heimdall to go on.

"In the winter of 1990 a couple lived here by the name of Laufey and at that time they had a son. His name, as I read was Loki. Even back then the distance between the front porch and the cliff edge was eroding at a frightening pace. At that time they were already losing upwards of two metres of coastline a year. In 2013 an area of land the size of a large playing field crumbled into the sea, and the Laufeys decided to leave for the north of England. Loki stayed; he was a singer and actor with regular roles at the local theatre. I suspect you already know that."

"I had been starting to guess."

"This wasn't the dark ages, you see; we still have a lot of documented evidence regarding this period of history. Theatre records tell us that in the summer of 2015 Mr Laufeyson was involved in an experimental performance at the theatre, some kind of re-hashing of Norse mythology, written and directed by a Mister Thanos."

They were walking as Heimdall talked, on their left the fields sloping down towards the sea, a rickety fence cutting them off from the dirt road, and to their right the few metres of scrubby trees and bushes that separated them from the cliff edge.

"He died there," Thor guessed again – "At the theatre. Those men – the ones behind the play, they did something."

"Perhaps." Heimdall nodded thoughtfully "Perhaps they did. But he did not die at the theatre. His body was found washed up on Whitstable beach three days after the final performance. Nobody had seen him since he left – with them – that night. Everyone said he had gone over the cliff. They might have called it suicide but for two things."

"He had no reason to kill himself?"

"A lot of reports say he was angry, that he had criticised the production and got on the bad side of everyone involved. It would seem our ghost had a sharp tongue in life and a knack for pissing people off. But he was not in any way unhappy, or without plans for his life. The other thing was that when the body was examined they found a set of wounds – small puncture marks around the mouth that were unlikely to have been self-inflicted."

Thor felt a shudder go through him and a distinct prickling around his mouth in sympathy.

"What do you suppose –"

"I don't. I'm just telling you what I know because I think you're the one who can help."

"Help?"

"Ghosts don't hang around for five hundred years if they don't want some help with something, Mr Odinson. I think you might be the first person Mr Laufeyson has been able to contact since his untimely death, I don't know why any more than you, and I don't know what he wants. But I think you're here to work it out."

"Revenge?"

"For a murder – if it _was_ a murder - five hundred years old? It doesn't sound likely."

Thor was about to put out another suggestion, anything he could throw out, when they rounded a corner as the cliff turned sharply to the left. Right in front of him the fields sloped up away from the sea and on top of the incline of the fields was a stunted tree, limbs quite ghastly against the grey autumn sky. Thor felt his head turn a circle as though he were dizzy, and he put out a hand to steady himself against the fence.

"Why did you bring me here?"

He felt sick. Heimdall looked at him for the first time in a complete lack of comprehension.

"I know this place," Thor said – "I dreamed this. There were men talking under that tree. I was afraid. As though they were going to kill me. How did you know about that?"

Heimdall kept looking at him thoughtfully.

"I didn't," he said – "I just thought it best not to speak of these things in any place where the dead might be listening."

Thor shivered and it was not just the breeze from off the sea. He wanted quite fiercely to be anywhere but here but he found his feet walking him forward with treacherous intent. As the clifftop curved the gap between the path and the edge got closer for a while, the trees thinning out until he was walking not two metres from the cliff edge with nothing between him and the drop but a recently erected fence. Where the gap was at its smallest Thor stopped, went to the fence and rested on it, tentatively. He was close enough, looking out to sea, for the salt spray to gently mist upon his face and looking down the sea at high tide was crashing close upon the rocks below. If he fell, he realised, the deposits of centuries of erosion would make his fall less than fatal as the cliff edge sluiced away from him in a tumble of brown earth and chalk but five hundred years ago –

Thor looked out at the cliff edge further up the path – some of them rose up sheer again, their edges less blunted by crumbling world. Up there if you fell the sea and the rocks would crush you between their teeth. Thor felt a sense of vertigo totally alien to him and turned away.

The dead tree upon the hill rose up directly in front of him. It felt like being trapped between the monstrous rocks and the whirlpool in one of those ancient stories his mother had told him. He walked back down the path towards Heimdall, putting the sea and the tree and the awful swirling feeling firmly at his back.

"You know about ghosts," he said to Heimdall, as they both began walking back the way they had come.

"More than most."

"I thought a ghost haunted a specific place." Thor had been thinking about this ever since the theatre – "That they – attached themselves to somewhere - but it was the same ghost in the theatre than at the house."

Heimdall nodded. He had clearly been expecting this.

"It _was_ just the house," he said – "But it's not anymore." He looked at Thor as though he would love to pick him apart for study – "I think now it's haunting _you._ It's attached itself _to you."_

_x_

 **Hee, is plotty – I'm not great at plotty usually so I hope this chapter didn't suck! I actually had a toss up between two big things I could have given away at the end of this chapter so there's a huge give away now that'll have to wait for a bit! Interestingly there really was a chunk of mainland the size of a football field fell into the sea off the Kentish coastline two years ago; my parents were actually planning to get a house near there at the time – oddly enough they decided against it! But yeah, Loki comes from now – who guessed already? :-)**

 **Now I gotta apologise in advance for as of tomorrow I'm working every day until Tuesday so updates may be slower this week, grr and argh. :-( But I'll do what I can! :-)**


	8. Chapter 8

**8.**

It occurred to Thor that he had come, albeit unknowingly, into this haunted house business with a surprising amount of preformed ideas as to how it was all supposed to go. First and foremost, he knew, was that he was supposed to feel a lot more unnerved by the whole business than he was actually feeling. He would, when he thought about it, have expected this of himself. Not that there were not ghosts in the city, but certainly you never heard about them. They were connected to old buildings, places with history, and there were none of those. In the city even the graveyards had all the headstones moved against a wall after an allotted twenty year span to make way for the newer dead. Any building over fifty years old was deemed a ruin and razed to make way for something shinier, higher, more efficient.

None of which was to say that ghosts had not existed in that world, just that they, like the living in those places, had nowhere much to go.

He supposed too that he did not really know what ghosts were. He had never given it much thought. Most people said they were energy, left over from a person who had lived in the place they then haunted. But did this have to be true? Thor knew that the basic laws of physics meant energy could not be destroyed, only changed – but did that mean that what was left behind had any real connection to the person who left it? Was energy like a thought, something not so much belonging to the person as a part of them? Or was it just like another item leftover, something of only random consequence on a shelf that somebody once liked enough to put there? Was a ghost just a book gathering dust until somebody read it? A door swinging open in the early afternoon, just waiting to be closed or not closed – did you go on past the thing or pick the thing up? Were the calls that the dead made ones that should be picked up or were they best left ringing into the void? Was there a void after all? He wondered these all vaguely as he headed up to bed.

It could only ever be a vague sort of wonder, Thor knew. Because he knew what his course was. He had never been in any doubt. He had never felt uneasy with the presence in this house, not from the start, nor as it seemed to get stronger. The worst he had felt was when it seemed to fade away. He felt nothing of any suggestion that the house wanted rid of him or that the spirit inside was hostile to him, indeed as he lay down in bed he could almost feel the place breathing out a warm goodnight.

What he did know was that he was being spoken to; he just wished he could hear the message properly. He had to do something, to help in some way- he just wished he knew what it was that he could do. Bed was comfortable and he fell asleep on a goodnight kiss. A kiss that felt – he was not sure – not so much familiar than potentially familiar – as though he was supposed to fall asleep on a kiss like that every night of his life. But how could his future life partner be someone who was dead? He had to be wrong.

"Yes I must admit, you usually are," Loki was saying. Thor blinked and rubbed at his eyes; surprisingly unsurprised by the illusion sat on his bed.

"Loki," he said.

"Yes" Loki turned his head, though his body did not move – "Just like you pictured? You _did_ picture me didn't you, Thor?"

"No – I – yes but – what's happening?" Thor sat up slowly in bed.

"You're dreaming, you idiot – what, did you think I'd come back to life?" Loki smiled and Thor realised, that much as he had struggled to know what he looked like, that part at least he had pictured perfectly. Loki's smile crept across his face like that first night's pale shadow had crept across his bed, a secretive silvery thing that he ached with a frightening need to kiss.

As though Loki could read his thoughts he shifted up the bed, turning himself to kneel over Thor, leaning in towards him. Thor could not look away; he realised that even looking Loki straight in the eye he could not have said what colour they were, they shifted and sparkled like the sea, the planes of his face cutting apart his sky like the wings of the birds outside.

"Shhh –" Loki whispered, coming in close – "You can't _just ask me._ That's not the way we play this." He looked down as though sorry and Thor thought for a moment – regretful. When he looked up again his forehead came to rest lightly against Thor's and there was a small pale hand on his shoulder. Then Loki kissed him.

Thor would always remember, forever after, how that first tentative dream kiss was at once the most amazing, most sensational kiss he had ever experienced. Loki's lips were softness riding a wicked curve, his insistence and the intent press of him made it impossible for Thor to think of anything else, but when he reached to hold him closer Loki was never quite at the angle he thought that he was. And yet he was everywhere; squirming and soft, fierce and hard, in all places at once and Thor was arching up desperately into those hands, towards that body. He had never been so painfully aware of having an erection in a dream. Loki smiled against his lips when he felt it, continuing his kiss still smiling.

"I can't just tell you –" he looked almost sad, but his hands were sliding down Thor's chest, pushing down the covers – "Something might –" nothing had ever felt so incredible as those ephemeral fingers on his cock, like a warm breeze with form – "explode – go out of control – blow a fuse somewhere – I don't know how I'm half way here either you know – I just know –" Loki spoke his words as though they were seduction, as though dripping rhyme and romance and Thor wanted to look for clues in all that he said but his head was groggy with dream and his cock was shuddering, aching and tingling in Loki's hands and he could not _think –_

"And if you could –" Loki whispered like a secret in his ear – "If you could _think_ at all I'm not sure I'd be able to say half as much but I'm trying – I can't _keep_ dropping clues in the condensation you know. Exhausting –" he shook his head, squeezing wickedly whilst Thor's hands balled into fists in the bedsheets.

"I go somewhere – I don't know. I liked having a body – it's a good body – I don't know where I go, how I'm here – I go –" It was Loki who gasped first, in a kind of innocent joy that he could have the effect on Thor he was having and Thor woke himself up, staining the sheets on account of a ghost. He blinked in the dark and the shadows around him shivered; he half had a mind he could hear them _tsk_ in irritation. He yawned, content and sleepy and fell back asleep quickly. To his utter relief Loki was still there, sat once again at the foot of the bed, cross legged against the footboard this time.

"Did I bloody say you could wake up?"

"Sorry," Thor mumbled, then smiled at himself for apologising to a ghost.

"Yes," Loki went on, answering the unspoken part more than the spoken – "But a ghost who just gave you the best orgasm you ever had, don't forget."

"How did you know that was –" Thor stopped, realising he had just given himself away – "Damn". Loki laughed.

"Thor," he said then, softly, and his forehead was crumpled. Just for a moment Thor felt his heart would break, he looked so very young – "I think I might love you. You have to work this out."

"I know – I think –"

"Check the electric," Loki blurted out obscurely and in a rush and then his image was gone, as though someone had flipped a switch and with that Thor was awake again and it was morning and –

"I think I might love you too," he was saying to the empty air. But he was alone in the house once more.

_x_

 **Ooosh, I've dropped clues like bombs in this chapter! Isn't Loki just the little ghost you always wanted? Next chapter: plot again! woot woot! I know I said this'd come sooner but I got horrible ill over Halloween and I'm only just on the mend, hopefully they'll come sooner now! :-)**


	9. Chapter 9

**9.**

Thor had not known how true the words were until they came out of his mouth. He wondered if Loki had heard, wherever he was now. He wondered how he had come to fall in love like this, not a week after moving away from the world he had known. He had not come out here to fall in love, had never really factored it into his future before. He wanted to argue with himself, to say that he could not possibly be feeling this. But if he was nothing else he had always hoped he was at least honest with himself. And it was true. He was in love and his love was dead.

So why did he stubbornly persist in feeling as though he was at the start of something wonderful? As though there was something to be found here if he could just work it out. He tried to replay the events of his dreams. He had never had a dream like this, not ever. He supposed if he was told he could have this relationship but they would only ever consummate in dreams, he would take that right now and consider himself luckier than most. He shook his head, laughed at himself; this was ridiculous.

And then, just to cement the idea that he and his ghost were moving in together, settling down almost into a domestic routine, Loki had given him that seemingly random instruction just before he winked out like a light.

 _Check the electric._

Well, Thor figured, he could do that at any rate, and he already had an idea of what he would find. He had begun to work it out last night and when he got down to the kitchen to peer at the energy inverter his suspicions were proven correct. The energy display was reading considerably lower than last night, though he knew for sure this time, that he had not used anything.

It was clear to him now that Loki's manifestation was dependent upon the power. That he was leeching energy from the solar panels, running on it as though he were a kitchen appliance. Thor half smiled to himself at the idea and he could almost hear Loki reply in his head – _oh very funny, what does that make you-a garden tool?_ He could almost see him roll his eyes.

Thor boiled a kettle and sat down with his tea. The simple act took the energy down to zero.

"I wish," he said aloud – "I wish Loki, you could at least leave me enough to make breakfast."

He sighed. The house offered up no reply. He supposed it would almost be worth saving all the energy for Loki; it was too quiet without him here. He sighed again, giving in, without the slightest bit of real distress, to the acceptance that he would have to go into town and get chips for breakfast. He did, sitting on the wall, over-looking the sea whilst the gulls came to bother him and offer up their intent interest in his activities. He foolishly threw one of them a chip, and within moments the sky was full of wings and beaks and squabbling. Thor was torn between wanting to watch them eat and tender possessiveness towards his breakfast.

In the end he left the hard bits for the gulls, brushed greasy hands on his jeans and headed off in search of the library. They already knew who he was when he went in to introduce himself, stooping at the threshold because the centuries old door was just a little too low for him. It was strange how in a place like this, where the population was so low, there was room enough to go for a long walk and never see a person, where the houses were so spaced out – that everybody knew who everybody else was. In the city you did not even know your own neighbour, were lucky to have a friend in the same apartment block let alone knowing any of the hundreds you might bump into just walking down the street.

They even had a library card ready for him. When he expressed his surprise the lady at the desk told him Heimdall had arranged it. He could not quite remember ever mentioning to Heimdall that he would come here and might have been annoyed at the presumption if he were not, after all, here.

"I'd like to read up some of the local records," he said, awkwardly.

"You'll be wanting the microfiche then," the lady said.

"The – what now?"

She nodded;

"It is an archaic system – here I'll show you".

He followed her through to a shadowy corner of the library, short rows of ancient screens and miles of filing cabinets running back into the dark. It was more frightening than the theatre or his haunted house.

"What period were you looking at?"

"Er –" he guessed, trying to remember the dates Heimdall had mentioned – "2015, I think, maybe some years before."

The woman nodded again and moved off into the labyrinth to find the right filing cabinet. When she came back she ushered him onto a seat, turned on the screen in front of him and fed some files into the back of it. As the thing hummed into life, newspaper articles appeared on the greenish screen and she showed him how to trawl through them. He did not really want to look specifically with her there and she sensed this, the way, he was noting, English people did, nodded one last time and said she would leave him to it, to shout if he needed any help.

The microfiche was hideously frustrating, tedious and complicated to get used to, but after about an hour's irritation, and a venture out into the world to find a take away tea, he began to get the hang of it. The next frustration was trawling though reams and reams of information that was utterly useless to him until finally he came across an article headed –

"Innovative New Director Brings Experimental Performance to Whitstable Theatre!"

Thor peered in more closely; he gathered that the off the wall modern director, renowned for "Bringing a frightening air of realism to a fantastical subject matter," was opening a ground breaking new interpretation of Norse Mythology as a surreal musical stage performance airing for its first run in the small Whitstable theatre. The first article he read had little further to say but a little while later he found a second announcing that local actor/ musician Loki Laufeyson had been cast in one of the leading roles. This time Thor stopped for longer; there was a small photo of Loki accompanying the article and even though he knew he would look the way he had dreamt him it was still a mild shock to see this confirmed. All of a sudden Loki was grinning up at him out of the past in blurry underwater green in the dull library light.

"Loki –" he whispered, reaching out a finger to touch the screen. It blipped when he touched it so he moved his hand quickly.

A little further down the reviews began to appear. One of them slated the entire production in no uncertain terms;

"Ragnarok's a flop!" it read "For all that Mr Thanos attempts to give us this subtle and surreal twist on the well-known story he may just as well have entitled it "RagnaROCK The Musical!" But then he found another article, written just after the closing night –

"Despite the general hokiness that this entire production has become defined by," he read, "Everyone agreed that there was something deeply unsettling about this final night's performance. It is difficult to know if this was the production itself or if events have been coloured by the subsequent disappearance of the local lead actor. However it is generally felt that the last half hour truly defined the director's signature style in bringing realism to the unrealistic."

Staring at the screen Thor was not sure quite what to make of this; he just knew that something in the description of the final night's "Realism" had left him feeling distinctly uncomfortable. He got up, checked out a couple of books on Norse mythology, thanked the librarian and headed home.

_x_

 **Yeah it's just a short plotty bit today, though hopefully it is a plot that is thickening somewhat! I was gonna go further but it was getting too long so I've split the plot chapters up a bit, more to come soon!**

 **Btw cause I haven't done this in a while, anyone interested in finding me on tumblr please come do so at** ** _shadow-in-the-shade._** **:-)**


	10. Chapter 10

**10.**

Thor read by candlelight that night. He even ate a cold dinner from food he got for himself on the way home.

"I hope you appreciate all I do for you," he said to the shadows as he sat at the kitchen table, again in candlelight, drinking cold never heated tea and munching on a sandwich from the village shop. It was, he thought, the biggest sacrifice he could make – the cooking that he so much loved here. But he did it willingly; it having occurred to him that the more energy he could save the more Loki could use. He wondered if Loki's inability to tell him more coherent information was not in part due to the failing electricity supply, and if it was then the more he could save for him the more it would help them both to unravel the past. He found himself saying all this aloud to the shadows as he went about the house.

He was becoming used now to the way the shadows shifted, that way that was by no means in accordance with what he and the light and any objects in the room were doing. He was starting to think he could read replies in the way they moved; indeed he felt like he was engaged in conversation. It seemed to Thor that whilst the shadows were glad of all he was telling them they were a little disgruntled as well. He wondered if Loki was angry with him, or if not angry – because he could not feel it as angry – then certainly impatient.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked the air, getting aggravated in turn at this perceived impatience – "I've not even lived here a week!"

But answer came there none. Thor sensed a sullenness in the shift in the shadows that he could not entirely understand. Nor could he gather why Loki was not making himself more known when he, Thor, was offering up everything he could by way of means to empower himself. He was tempted to turn a light on to read by just to annoy him right back, but thought maybe, just maybe Loki was saving his energy for Thor's dreams. He hung on to that as he got into bed to read about Ragnarok by candlelight, and what he read disturbed him.

His first dreams that night ran high on the agitation those stories had left in his mind. He woke up sweating from a nightmare of snakes. He had dreamt of a great banquet where all the gods had sat feasting. But when the trickster spoke for the first time his tongue lashed out barbed and crooked from between his lips, cutting and slicing whomsoever he turned to. Thor watched it all from within, paralyzed as the blood flew and the great trestle table ran over with a wave of red. Then the trickster was running and he was running alongside, there was water and gasping and the faint suggestion of ice. He tried to speak but his mouth would not open, he was no longer sure whether he was alongside the trickster or the god himself. When he tried to open his mouth again he felt the stitches strain and cut at his lips, trickles of blood running down from his chin and then everything was stinging, a constant steady drip of something foul burning his skin and he was held tight in crushing writhing coils that glistened like oil and he was burning up, he surely had to be.

And then he was running again, this time he was running along the clifftop dreading the spot to which his feet would take him. He wanted to stop running but he could not order his legs to still. He dreaded the tree and clifftop and the men most of all but they were there, of course they were there. He could hear their voices from where his feet froze him, finally and when he did not want them to.

 _"_ _We're really going to do this?"_

 _"_ _Yes."_

 _"_ _How?"_

 _"_ _You leave that to the make-up department and special effects."_

 _This voice was grim but somebody laughed softly at the words._

 _"_ _For god's sake, do you realise what you're saying?"_

 _"_ _Yes. What's the matter? He's been nothing but trouble anyway. Nobody likes him. We'll get away with this, we always do."_

 _The silence on the clifftop in the wake of this was agonising and cold._

 _"_ _Fine."_

 _"_ _You are sure?"_

 _"_ _Yes," the speaker took a deep breath that Thor could hear down the hill – "Yes. Fine. On closing night – we do it all for real."_

Slowly they all nodded and just as slowly, with paralyzing inevitability they turned to look at him. Thor screamed at himself to wake up – which usually worked – but he could not. He was squeezing his eyes tight shut but he was still on the clifftop shaking in the wake of this horror.

"Thor," he did not want to turn around, fearing one of the shadow men behind him.

"Thor."

He staggered back, his hand grasped for the railing that had stood between him and the cliff edge. It was not there in the dream. He flailed wildly, for a horrible sick moment starting to feel himself fall already. But he had not started to fall.

"Thor, for god's sake".

He felt himself pulled back onto the ground and not entirely gently deposited on his hands and knees on the damp grass. He squinted up. Loki was looking down at him shaking his head.

"Thor, this isn't helping".

"Loki –" he gasped – "I know –" his eyes were streaming, though he was not sure if the cold was from the wind or from fear – "I'm sorry Loki, I'm so sorry –"

"Oh god," Loki sighed as though Thor was boring him – "Don't be. It's done, it's all done. You're missing the point. You've been missing the point from the start, you oaf. Of all the idiots I could connect with –"

Somehow Loki's stream of vaguely abusive irritation was making Thor feel better, comforted almost. Loki broke off and shook his head again, looking down at him and extending his hand with a tolerant sigh to haul him to his feet.

"Oh –" Loki paused, bit his lip, looked at Thor again, something warm and captivated glimmering in his eyes – "But you _are_ sunshine – of course. Of course you are –" he said it without a hint of irony, lovingly almost, and as though he had just realised something important. Thor realised too that Loki had never been this clear to him before, this real.

"Yes," Loki seemed to read his thoughts again – "I should thank you for that, I suppose. I know you do love your cooking. You look clearer too – you were blurry before like – " he laughed a little, not entirely humorously – "Well, like a ghost."

"You're the ghost," Thor pointed out.

"Yes, congratulations, and you're the idiot."

"I love you".

Loki smiled then; just for a brief few seconds his face transformed, soft and almost golden and Thor reached out to stroke the corners of that smile gently. Loki kissed his fingers and then sighed.

"Look this is all very nice, but you're still missing the bloody point –"

"No," Thor shook his head – "I have to go back to the theatre don't I? That first day I was there you were leading me to something. Something I need to find –"

"It's a recording," Loki said impatiently – "There's a recording there of that final night's performance. The last song. They said I had to record it in advance, it would make it more realistic on the last night if they played it as an over voice rather than have me really sing it. I was stupid. I should have known. But it's there, the last song, but it's not important –"

"No Loki – I'll get it. I will, you have to let me –"

"I SAID IT'S NOT IMPORTANT!" Loki screamed it suddenly, so ferociously Thor took a step back – back from the frustration and fury in that voice, flaring deadly in the silver – green eyes.

Thor stepped back. Right off the cliff edge and now he was falling, it seemed for a very long time; he could see the black expanse of cruel water coming to meet him and could do nothing to stop it. When he landed it was jarring, shattering and freezing. The water closed over his head and it was ice, he was enclosed in ice on all sides trying to scream for the cold.

He woke up screaming – or he thought he was at first. In truth no sound came out. He was still cold. He shivered with it, chilled to the bone in spite of the early morning sunlight.

_x_

 **Oooh twisty – hell well I hope it's twisty and not just obvious where this is going; hopefully in answering a few questions I've thrown up so new ones! :-)**


	11. Chapter 11

**11.**

The sun fought the rain that morning and in the end the rain won out. The world had long since become suspicious of rain and long since used to hiding indoors at the first sight thereof. First it had been the floods and then the acid. The fallout had cut the world's population by more than a third over two hundred years ago and it had taken over a hundred years more for the rain to even begin to fall pure again. Everyone's grandparents had stories of how _their_ parents could not go outside in the rain that would burn your skin and take out your eyes.

Thor could only assume that he was strange. He had always loved the rain; he wondered now if it was a kind of sympathy – that he had grown up loving it purely because everyone else hated it. He wondered if it was insensitive of him to like something that had caused so much damage, but whether he meant to like it or not, he still did and that was all. It was the first time it had really rained since he came here, and so he did what he supposed only came logically to him – he went out for a walk.

The rain, warm though it was, cleared his head as he took the cliff road towards town. He quite enjoyed the discomfort of it trickling down his hair and into his collar. He turned his face up to the sky and took in the smells of water and salt and wet ground. Out at sea the waves were as angry at the weather as most people tended to be, and they were shouting about it too, in high bursts of squalling chatter, flinging themselves petulantly against the shore, snatching greedily at the cliff edge and scurrying back licking chalk from their lips.

It occurred to Thor how much his ghost had consumed him almost since day one. He wondered if he had missed too much of the experience of the place in his searching after the past. He wondered why Loki had insisted so vehemently that it was not important. If it was not important why was he being led to work it all out? What did a ghost want if it was not for the past to be dug up? Was there something beyond rest that a ghost could hope for? And if so, what? Thor threw his loud and tumultuous thoughts out into the wind and rain but the waves and the gulls brought back only louder cries of their own and no answers.

By the time Thor reached the town he was wet through and regretting every decision he had ever made. He hardly even had time to wonder whether it would be alright to show up at Mjoll's house in the high street unannounced before he found himself on her doorstep. It had _always_ been alright to show up at her house unannounced. She did not even look surprised to see him, just shook her head and grinned and nodded –

"You're wet."

"Yes, I'd noticed. You gonna leave me wet on your doorstep?"

Mjoll shrugged and started to close the door. Thor pouted.

"Just kidding," she opened up and stepped aside – "Come in. I'll get you a towel. Don't drip all over my shit."

She ushered Thor into her small front room, announced that she'd be back in a second, and left him to do the precarious dance of where to sit on his own. He really was wet through, and aware that there was only the one small sofa in the room did not want to drench at least half of it just by sitting down. In the end he knelt in front of the fireplace which Mjoll had clearly been in the process of prepping when he knocked. He carried on scrunching up newspaper where she had left off.

She was longer than he imagined it should take to find a towel and he thought he heard murmured voices from upstairs. When she finally came back, chucking him a towel, he raised an eyebrow at her.

"Euphemia Coulson, the stone mason's daughter," she nodded, trying not to sound smug and thereby sounding smugger than she even felt. The cool attempt to keep her face neutral fell apart at the end of the last word and her face broke into an enormous grin. Thor high fived her and she kept on nodding as she sat down.

"Ohh yeeah," she breathed – "Last night was –" unbelievably she almost giggled – "Quite a night".

"Hence the fire at half two," Thor nodded.

"Thor, not all of us rise at first rainfall like you. How's your ghost?"

Thor rubbed his hair to some semblance of dryness.

"You don't have dry pants do you?" Mjoll blinked at him slowly.

"Thor, I'm five foot two. No, I do not have massive-sized man pants. Light the fire."

He lit the fire, peering at it in intense concentration for a while until the first wisp became a flame.

"Mind you –" Mjoll added – "I think maybe Effie has a spare skirt…."

Thor side eyed her, unimpressed both at the offer and the dramatic pause she put in before following it, as he had guessed she would with –

"- On my bedroom floor!" Mjoll hit an imaginary drum in celebration – "Tea?" she smiled brightly before Thor could actively roll his eyes at her.

"My ghost –" Thor said slowly, when she came back with the tea – "I don't know. I – we – I think we had a fight."

"Oh my god," Mjoll groaned – "What, are you guys _dating?"_ She was about to laugh when she saw the grimace that came and went on Thor's face.

"Oh. Oh shit. Thor – Thor dude you can't –"

"I know," he groaned.

"You can't be in love with a ghost."

"I _know."_

"I mean – he dead."

"Damn it Mjoll, I know that!" Thor rubbed his face in both hands. He had not wanted anyone to say it out loud. He should have known that she would.

"Thor –"Mjoll whistled, in a heavy breath out – "My friend, you are more fucked than you know."

"No, I _do_ know."

"Aww man." As if the whole thing wasn't difficult enough, Mjoll, who avoided human contact like the plague was suddenly hugging him. He felt, for the first time in his life, like he was half her size, she managed to fit her arms around him so solidly and effectively. When she finally broke away and backed off it was with an awkward, half apologetic little grin.

"And that's a Mjoll hug," she shrugged.

"It was…nice."

"Yeah? Don't get used to it. But Jesus, you need at least a hug cause you can't have sex with a ghost."

"Well actually –" Thor began.

"Oh Christ. How? What? Oh shit-actually, no don't, I don't wanna hear about it."

It was a lie. Thor told her the whole story and she wanted to hear about it all. By the time he was done the sky outside was turning half dark.

"I wish I could be like you," he finished up – "You know – not doing Romantic."

"Yeah, you say that." Finally it was Mjoll's turn to grimace and Thor caught her take a furtive look at the ceiling.

"What, really?"

"Shut up."

"You could ask her to come down, you know. I don't wanna –"

"Meh. It's only five. Don't think we got to sleep until you were waking up this morning. But yeah I'll go wake her – you wanna stay for breakfast?"

"I really don't want to –"

"Thor please stay for breakfast, 'kay? I've not done this bit before."

Thor stayed. By the time he left it was full dark outside and, as he was dry and the rain was still unceasing he called Heimdall to take him home, Mjoll's insistence that he come round for that crap movie night sometime soon ringing in his ears.

-x-

"Loki?" he called out to the silent house. He tried the switch. Nothing.

"Loki?"

A feeling of dread began to pool in him like poisoned tea on a winter's day. He fumbled in his pocket for a rechargeable torch. It was damp, but with a bit of twisting he got it to work. He flashed the light around the hall and into the front room. The pool of dread solidified into an icy fear. The house was silent as the grave and it felt _empty._ Something it had not done since the day he moved in. And the hall and front rooms looked like a storm had charged through them, everything torn down, flung around, tipped over, the entire house, as he soon discovered, torn up into utter chaos.

As though a ghost had been at work.

_x_

 **Heh heh, I have more but this seemed such a good place to leave it. Tune in soon to find out what's up with Loki. *Drum roll*. Yes I'm back, miss me? :-)**


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